This assignment is for ETC5521 Assignment 1 by Team Magpie comprising of Junhao Wang and Priya Ravindra Dingorkar.

1 Acknowledgements

Our sincere gratitude goes out for their guidance and encouragement to Professor Dianne Cook, Dr Emi Tanka, and the tutors Sayani Gupta and Sherry Zhang. Their culminating efforts have placed us in a position where we can generate this report collaboratively.

2 Introduction and Motivation

Attending a university course is a big decision for students, because it will have a large effect on the advancement of a person’s future, with a huge cost to both money and time, based on the above evidence, we can conclude that going to university is indeed an investment and the return on investment is very worrying. Since everyone knows that the US is one of the most popular yet costly higher education destinations in the world, and the cost range is wide (for example: tuition fees range from $5,000 to $50,000 (£4,074-£ 40,746) per annum). Most undergraduate degrees last four years, so on average students graduate with a debt worth $132,860 (£101,505), we are interested in how good the investment in American education is.

3 Research Question

3.1 Primary Question

How valuable is the investment in education among America universities?

Since tuition fee is relatively high for most students, or their families, value for money is of great concern. This question is to decover how highly valued are the tuition fees among universities in America, by analyzing the various aspects of the education system in US.

3.2 Secondary Questions

  • How does the tuition fee vary across the different types of institutions? This information can be drawn from tuition cost, and can give a point of view of the American education system.

  • What is the ratio of net-cost to total cost among America universities? This can show how much burden a student has taken.

  • How is student’s career development among America universities? This information can be drawn from salary_potential, if middle-career pay differ a lot from early-career pay, then we believe there is a well career development in that university.

  • How does the tuition rate vary over the various years for the various types of courses?

  • What is percentage of enrollment diverse population studying, across the US ?

4 Data description

It is through data collection that a business or management has the quality information that they need for further analysis, study, and research to make informed decisions.

We will perform exploratory, data review in this study on the subject of College Tuition, Diversity, and Pay Dataset.

This collection of data primarily receives all the information from various sources but originally from the US Department of Education.

The data, taken from the original pages, turned out to be very large in size, which is why the author, for the convenience of the audience and to produce informative results, filtered the data into five comma-separated documents using web scraping in R with the support of the rvest package.

Let’s look at the small snippets of the various data sets, and get a better understanding of the variables

4.1 Data on Diversity

The diversity_school data set comes The Chronicle of Higher Education.

name total_enrollment state category enrollment
University of Phoenix-Arizona 195059 Arizona Women 134722
University of Phoenix-Arizona 195059 Arizona American Indian / Alaska Native 876
University of Phoenix-Arizona 195059 Arizona Asian 1959
  • Name has data type character properties that describe the school name
  • Total Enrollment has double datatype properties representing the total number of students enrolled
  • State with character datatype representing the various states
  • Category with character properties defining the group Group / Racial / Gender
  • Enrollment with double datatype properties specifying the specific enrollment.

4.2 Data on History

The historical_tuition dataset been obtained from U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

type year tuition_type tuition_cost
All Institutions 1985-86 All Constant 10893
All Institutions 1985-86 4 Year Constant 12274
All Institutions 1985-86 2 Year Constant 7508
  • type variable having character datatype describes the Type of school (All, Public, Private)
  • year having character format describes the corresponding Academic year
  • tuition_type having character datatype refers to duration of the degree, Tuition Type All Constant (dollar inflation adjusted), 4 year degree constant, 2 year constant, Current to year, 4 year current, 2 year current
  • tuition_cost having double datatype represents the education fees/Tuition cost in USD

4.3 Data on Salary Potential

Salary_potential data set origins from Payscales.

rank name state_name early_career_pay mid_career_pay make_world_better_percent stem_percent
1 Auburn University Alabama 54400 104500 51 31
2 University of Alabama in Huntsville Alabama 57500 103900 59 45
3 The University of Alabama Alabama 52300 97400 50 15
  • rank having double datatype properties defines the potential salary rank within state
  • early_career_pay having double datatype defines the estimated early career pay in USD
  • mid_career_pay having double datatype defines the estimated mid career pay in USD
  • make_world_better_percent having double datatype represents the percent of alumni who think they are making the world a better place -stem_percent having double datatype defines the percent of student body in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)

4.4 Data on the Tuition Cost

The Tuition cost data set is obtained from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

name state state_code type degree_length room_and_board in_state_tuition in_state_total out_of_state_tuition out_of_state_total
Aaniiih Nakoda College Montana MT Public 2 Year NA 2380 2380 2380 2380
Abilene Christian University Texas TX Private 4 Year 10350 34850 45200 34850 45200
Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Georgia GA Public 2 Year 8474 4128 12602 12550 21024
  • in_state_tuition having double datatype depicts the Tuition fee for in-state residents in USD
  • out_of_state_tuition double Tuition for out-of-state residents in USD

4.5 Data on Tuition Income

The tuition income has been obtained from the dataset Tution Tracker and Priceconomics

name state total_price year campus net_cost income_lvl
Piedmont International University NC 20174 2016 On Campus 11475 0 to 30,000
Piedmont International University NC 20174 2016 On Campus 11451 30,001 to 48,000
Piedmont International University NC 20174 2016 On Campus 16229 48_001 to 75,000
  • campus having character datatype depicts whether the school is On or off-campus
  • net_cost having double datatype denotes Net-cost - average actually paid after scholarship/award
  • income_lvl having character datatype gives u information about the Income bracket

4.6 Data Structure and Cleaning Process

All the information gathered in these different data files was achieved by web scraping using the rvest library, html nodes, html url, and generating data set in tibble, mutating new columns and linking rows together later on. All the data was scraped and written in csv and later, the csv was read in to R environment using the readr function.

5 Analysis and Findings

One of the key reasons students chose to study in the USA is the prestige of the country for renowned higher education programs. Completing a degree from one of the best higher education programs in the world would make you stand out from peers of similar backgrounds and job experiences.

Let us examine and know the important facts about the US education system. We look at the various aspects when studying, the diversity of education, the history of education, the cost of tuition, income among people people in the United States, the different wages currently on the market, and similar exciting analyses.

5.1 The Distribution of Tution Fees in US.

Let us look at the distribution of the spectrum of tuition fees in the United States for residents and non-residents of the United States across the various types of institutions in the United States

Distribution of Tution Fees in US

Figure 5.1: Distribution of Tution Fees in US

In the figure 5.1 taking a closer look at the graph, we can observe the distribution of tuition fees, we can conclude that the levels for both residents and non-residents of the United States vary. Some of the important results from this graph are, mainly US non-residents prefer, heading to the country’s public or for profit institutions rather than the private university. From the plot it is very apparent that the private rates are exceedingly high, some going up to the $60,000. Let’s speak about U.S. residents, we see that U.S. residents prefer public colleges, one of the reasons why tuition may be comparatively less than the other types of institutions. Therefore, we conclude that the expense of private universities is higher for U.S. citizens and non-residents, relative to public and profit institutions, we see more non-residents entering U.S. public universities. Even some people are entering the private institutions.

5.2 Difference in fees after any Scholarship / Awards Earned

As we know, students are providing grants for their education in various colleges, which lowers the pressure of the tuition fess by several inches. Let us understand if the amount of income is at the criterion when deciding on the student grants.

Difference in tution fees after Scholarships/Awards

Figure 5.2: Difference in tution fees after Scholarships/Awards

In the figure 5.2 we see that after earning any scholarships / awards we note a decrease in tuition fees. A popular aspect that we find over the years is that the scholarship earned by the various applicants is often judged much of the time , based on the applicant’s income level and certainly a strong profile that the applicant would already have. Looking closely at the graph, we see that for applicants with income level above USD 110,000, there is a smaller gap in the scholarship relative to the other level of income. Applicants with income rates ranging from 0 to 30,000 USD, have a significant gap between the real tuition costs and the amount charged for the scholarship by the applicants. We also note that the gap in these patterns from the year 2010 has been showing and upward trend. We may therefore confidently state that applicants with lower incomes earn more scholarship grants when they are compared with applicants with higher incomes.

5.3 Student’s Career Development among America Universities

After graduation, a student’s improvement can be calculated in terms of his wage growth. Let’s look at the various states, where we see the greatest change in the wage growth.

Students Career Development

Figure 5.3: Students Career Development

In the figure 5.3 we note wage increases in various US states. We conclude that graduates, who have completed their California education, showed the greatest increase in their employment and mid-life incomes. We note, on close observation, that New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio and New York all show great levels of wage growth. Most of the States in the US, shows a decent growth of salaries in their existence excluding a handful. From the above graph we have reported a few states that show strong improvement levels in the salary. Furthermore, this leads us to believe that students who have completed their education in these states have increased their salaries over the years, which allows us to understand the student’s career development over the years.

After researching salary increases, our interests in terms of which universities in the United States, in which state shows an improved amount of more than 75% and their corresponding rank in that state. The table helps the user find the university’s preferred option, its ranking, in which state the university is situated.

Figure 5.4: Institutions showing more than 75% Improvement Rate in salaries after Education

5.4 Alumini of US that Make World a Better Place to Live

Alumni serve many important positions, such as helping create and develop the brand of an organization through word-of-mouth marketing. Alumni play an significant role in promoting organizations that benefit students and their activities. Let us look at alumni from which state a better place to stay in a world

Alumini that make the world a better place to Live

Figure 5.5: Alumini that make the world a better place to Live

In the figure 5.5 We can clearly distinguish that that students passed out from the universities of the following state Mane, Montana, Oklahoma, Hawaii and Florida contribute the most to making this world survive better than the majority of the alumni in different states in the United States.

5.5 Diversity in Education in US

US is one of the country with the highest rankings, showing cultural diversity. US has student coming from around the world. Let’s evaluate the various groups and the percentage of US university enrollment.

Figure 5.6: Percentage of Enrollment among different universities throughout US

In the figure 5.6 we can

6 References